The Task

I recently had a task for users to easily copy information displayed in a Gridview, then paste it into another application. They only needed a few pieces of information from the GridView to be copied. I searched Google for some quick code that I could plug in and make it possible. I quickly found some solutions, but, they only worked for Internet Explorer. That’s a problem because my customer only uses Google Chrome. I tested what I thought were the top 5 of the solutions, but I could not get them to work with Google Chrome, I did eventually solve the problem, but, it was easy 10+ hours later with trial and error. I thought my solution might help others, so here goes.

The HTML Page

In my ASPX page I added a LinkButton and a Hidden field inside my GridView’s TemplateField where I also had my existing checkbox to make a row selection. I placed the LinkButton just below it so it would be easy for the user’s to click right away and not have to scroll right, just click, go to their other application and paste. Just a note about security, there is a security issue because you really don’t want a website you visit to have control of your computers clipboard (where the information is temporarily stored during a copy and paste). For that reason a user interaction has to be performed (in this case a LinkButton), which signals that the operation is OK to do.

Now the Codebehind…

First I’ll start with my “GatherCB” function, so you can see how I assembled the data that I’m going to copy to the clipboard, then the actual function that copies the text from the LinkButton, this code is vb, but you can easily convert it to c# with an online converter there is one available from telerix here.

Another hidden gem

Recently I had a multi-boot system when booting Windows Server 2008 it would constantly want to do a consistency check when starting. If I let it run the consistency check it would corrupt the boot volume. So, anytime I rebooted I had to remember to quickly press any key to stop the automatic disk check process. Here’s a screenshot of what I’m talking about.
I thought there has to be a way to reset that dirty bit. So, I started searching the internet. This ended up being a much bigger deal than I had imagined. Just about every site suggested using a hex editor to manually set the bit on the byte that contains the dirty bit location. Well, that’s just great if you don’t mind taking the risk. I attempted to use the utilities but I could never find a match for the byte that was listed. I didn’t want to just try it on a close match and make the drive completely not bootable. So, I kept searching…

Finally I found CHKNTFS.EXE on a Microsoft website the original article can be found here. I was pretty surprised all the other solutions could be so potentially dangerous, and here was a simple utility to do exactly what I wanted. Here’s how to use it and for this tutorial we’ll assume the drive I want to stop checking is drive C.

How to use CHKNTFS.EXE to reset the dirty bit

First you’ll want to open an elevated command prompt. Just go to your start menu, find “Windows System”, then right click “Command Prompt” and select “More”, then “Run as Administrator”.

From here you’ll get a command prompt…

Now, type chkntfs /x c:

Note that it doesn’t return anything, so you might think it didn’t work. But, if you don’t get an error about incorrect syntax you’re good. Also, there are other switches that might be useful to see those check the link above. If you need computer hardware, networking support, any type of custom application work and are in the Dallas / Ft. Worth area I’d be happy to help, just give me a call 972.571.4808.

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